Marilyn's Musings

I confess. I am an unrepentant pantser, with only occasional regrets. I have heard writers say they simply sat down—in the day at a typewriter, I suppose, and today at the computer—wrote that first sentence, and took off from there, as curious as future readers would be to see what would happen. I’m not quite that bad. I have notes and rough ideas of what’s going to happen on the pages of the work-in-progress, but those ideas usually change dramatically as I write. Right now, I’m working on a Blue Plate Café cozy set in a small Texas town and involving a thirty-year-old unsolved murder. I’m in the soggy middle, and the other day I was semi-stumped, writing some desultory background material, mostly to keep going. Most of it will probably come out in first draft. And then suddenly, one character asked the other a direct, blunt question, and the entire direction of the last half of the novel changed, much for the better. I know where it is going, but I can’t attribute that sud...